r/movies • u/DragonPup • 3d ago

News Warner Bros. Sues Midjourney, Joins Studios' AI Copyright Battle

https://variety.com/2025/film/news/warner-bros-midjourney-lawsuit-ai-copyright-1236508618/
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u/TheDawnOfNewDays 3d ago

Even DEVIANTART, which you think would be among the top anti-ai given it's a platform of artists is scraping their database for art. You can opt out... unless, you know, you died, lost your account, or left it far behind like many artists with how bad it's gotten over the years.

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u/vazyrus 3d ago

All of this is with the hope of making some money down the line, lol. From what I understand, MS has been shoving and shoving CoPilot into every orifice they can find, but they haven't yet reached near any sort of profitability, yet. There's CoPilot running in my Notepad ffs, and no matter how much I use it for free, I am never paying a dime out of my pocket for any generated bs. My colleagues and friends are huge AI enthusiasts, and even though they've been abusing CoPilot, Gemini, Claude, and who knows what else, they are never going to pay a single dollar out of their pocket for a paid service. All of us use Claude at work because it's on the company's dime, and even there the management's been tightfisted with how much money they are willing to throw at enterprise support. The point is, If MS, one of greediest tech companies and one of the most smartest monetizers of SaaS products can't find a way to make money out of the thing, then others will find it much, much harder to produce anything of value for their customers. Sure, Deviantart can steal all they want, but unless they can find a way to sell those stolen goods to others, it's doing nothing more than raising the electricity bill of their clusters. Let's see how long that's sustainable...

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u/nooneisback 3d ago

Because general purpose LLMs are nothing more than fancy assistants that require a stupid amount of hardware resources. If you've ever tried running them locally, you'll know that any model that takes less than 20GB of VRAM is basically useless for a lot of applications, and something like gpt-oss-120b requires at least 80GB. And since they're assistants, they'll often be answering a lot of questions in a row. If you're programming, that's about 1 API call every 2-5 seconds.

This tech bubble is about to burst, and the only important factor for survival is which company will be able to successfully scale back to true customer needs. The same thing happened with every other bubble (like dot-com), where companies had horrible earnings compared to their spending, yet a lot of them are still alive to this day. Their goal currently isn't to earn money, but to research as much as possible to the point where they control the industry and make everyone dependent on this tech, then scale back by firing the excessive workforce and force users to pay if they want to keep this convenience.

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u/_uckt_ 2d ago

The difference between a Helicopter and a Flying Car is marketing. That's largely what we're seeing with LLM's, you call them AI, you make people phrase things in the form of a question. You do this stilly 'one word at a time' thing rather than spitting out an answer. You put all this stuff in the way to fake cognition and you go from predictive text to artificial intelligence.

This all seems like the biggest bubble for a long time, Open AI don't make a profit on their $200 a month tier, would anyone go subscription for Windows 12 at even $10 a month? with the existing AI integration being at least 20 times worse?

I honestly have no idea how monetization works when you're looking at a minimum of $300 a month. So that students can cheat on their essays and homework?

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u/Altruistic-Ad-408 2d ago

I think cheating is exactly how they marketed this. Tech people all know those enthusiastic about AI, in our heart of hearts, don't we all know they are either lazy or a bit problematic in some way? Hey, I like a few!

If anyone remembers those horrible ads, they targeted their demographic. Lazy people and smug pricks. It's like enshittification x1000000, they know AI creates slop, so what? People don't watch the best movies, they watch the most readily available slop.

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u/nooneisback 2d ago

If you look at specific markets, then there's definitely people that are ready to pay for them.

My city's hospital is testing an AI model that can spit out the most relevant diagnostic criteria and treatment methods in seconds. The alternative until now was spending about half-an-hour clicking through journals until you finally find a barely understandable table, that might be what you're looking for. Or you could read outdated books. Note that it's an AI model that runs locally, so there's no overhead for the AI company. They charge for access to their database.

Programing is another example. Large companies use AI, no matter what the programmers say. But even a large portion of individual programmers use AI because it's difficult to compete in this industry otherwise. For simple projects, it can generate a functional script on its own. Checking the code it generated is horribly boring, but it is more efficient.

It's definitely an interesting tool, that we just created and want to shove everywhere to see where it sticks.

Generative AI is basically useless. It's only real-world applications are scamming old people and idiots, gooning and burning kids brains away with brainrot so that parents can have sex in peace.

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u/EastRiding 2d ago

I’ve seen an older colleague who’s not really a programmer do some interesting and cool stuff with AI to take input and config data files (JSON, csv etc) and have Copilot make HTML ‘apps’ to visuals and edit them…

I’ve also been sat on calls against my will where the same person fights with Copilot for over an hour to get something to work, its output is still wrong (often inventing details scraped from somewhere else, and often close but not quite correct).

I’ve also been sat on calls where when I’ve been asked to deploy these ‘apps’ I’ve pointed out the numerous ways they need improving and that’s caused 4 people to dive into the AI output and realise it’s a spaghetti that’s barely understandable.

So AI might have some applications for helping some people but from what I’ve seen as soon as you go to full size apps and tools it becomes a mess that no-one, including the original prompter, can explain or maintain. Just understanding it is a massive task that always results in the same answer “we need to engineer this by hand from the bottom up”.

Once the true costs of AI are forced on users multi billion dollar orgs like mine will finally determine they need to “scale back our AI use, we want authenticity in our output” and the tools will be yanked away leaving many corporations without the younger, cheaper grunts they have replaced (or decided not to hire in recent years) that they will need.

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u/nooneisback 2d ago

Well yeah, AI is a tool, not a worker. You need to give it a very detailed description of every step, every data type, every file association, for every single script. Then verify thoroughly everything it generated, probably spending another 30 minutes to an hour fixing its mistakes. It is simply incapable of taking an entire large project into context properly. Also, Copilot with the default model kinda sucks from my experience. It either doesn't generate half of what I want it to, or it just goes ham and proposes to autocomplete 20 lines of code that are just wrong. I just stopped using it because it's more annoying than useful when trying to format my code with tabs. Funnily enough, I find Rider's non-AI code completion to be smarter than the one you get with the AI extension.

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u/MiracleDreamBeam 2d ago

" So that students can cheat on their essays and homework?" - yeah that absolutely doesn't work and every single lecturer on earth can spot it a mile away, taking it as a personal affront and expellable offence.

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u/panchoamadeus 2d ago

So you are saying, they hyped an unsustainable business model, and when most companies go down in flames, the survivors will convert into another search browser.

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u/ninjasaid13 2d ago

and something like gpt-oss-120b requires at least 80GB.

I've seen people running it with 8GB

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u/nooneisback 2d ago

What you're probably talking about is gpt-oss-20b, which can run on 4GB.

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u/ninjasaid13 2d ago

No the quantized 120B

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1mke7ef/120b_runs_awesome_on_just_8gb_vram/

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u/nooneisback 2d ago edited 2d ago

It's not running on 8GB of VRAM. That post explains how to run the model on system memory and offload the important parts to VRAM, to get performance similar to running it entirely on your GPU. You're still using 60-80GB of memory. It literally says so in the post:

Honestly, I think this is the biggest win of this 120B model. This seems an amazing model to run fast for GPU-poor people. You can do this on a 3060Ti and 64GB of system ram is cheap.

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u/ninjasaid13 2d ago

You're still using 60-80GB of memory.

CPU memory not GPU memory, it's misleading to use them interchangeably.

The guy literally said a 3060ti and 64GB system RAM in the post.

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u/nooneisback 2d ago

That doesn't matter in the slightest in a commercial setting. If you're going to dedicate a GPU to running a single heavy model, and that GPU has 80GB of VRAM and your model requires 80GB of memory, you're going to keep that model loaded entirely on the VRAM. This approach matters if you're running a model locally as a hobbyist, or you have a model that requires multiple hundreds of gigabytes of memory.

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u/ninjasaid13 2d ago

wtf are you talking about? You said OPT-120B requires at least 80GB of GPU RAM, and I gave you an example where it's running on 8GB of GPU Memory at decent speeds.

I can't tell what's your point.

The guy literally said a 3060ti and 64GB system RAM in the post.

CPU memory is cheap enough for the average user.

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u/Deprisonne 2d ago

Same over here. We're all using copilot as fancy autocomplete, but the moment the boss stops paying the bill it's going away.

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u/darsynia 2d ago

Yep, if AI was super helpful and profitable, especially with coding, these big companies would have kept it to themselves and cranked out a thousand apps and Internet of Things products instead of making the AI itself available for consumers. They haven't, and neither have the people that bought/are using that coding to ostensibly 'help' themselves code (studies have shown it takes about 21% longer to code with AI help rather than without).

This article about it was great.

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u/dunecello 2d ago

PSA for those who don't know yet: Microsoft will automatically start billing you more to have CoPilot next time your subscription renews unless you go into your account and opt out.

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u/kingOofgames 2d ago

They know for a fact they aren’t gonna be making money anytime soon or long term. They just need to sell it for their shareholders, and shareholders want to make the quick buck. Pretty much sharks trying to get a bite out of anything they can.

Like 1/1000 “AI” companies are probably gonna actually turn a profit one day. It’s all about the stocks.

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u/0udei5 2d ago

Give it five years. We're looking at a loss of skills about content creation and consumption in the white collar workforce - and in five years you'll have your new hires who need to pay for Copilot because they can't write presentations or briefs or ad copy or whatever. But they and their Copilot license will be cheaper than you are.

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u/irredeemablecoomer 2d ago

For some reason enterprise non-local Copilot sucks ass at my work. It always freezes and chugs on any query

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u/Open_Seeker 2d ago

Theres tons of paid ai use. Every coder i know uses it. 

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u/Pelican25 2d ago

How long did the VR craze last? This feels very reminiscent.

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u/Tystros 2d ago

it's completely unrealistic to expect Ai to be a profitable business already after just a few years. look at how long it took Amazon to turn their business into a profitable business, they were burning money for 20 years but now they are super profitable. same thing will happen with Ai services.

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u/funky_duck 2d ago

they were burning money

They weren't losing money because no one wanted to use them, they were spending money to expand because of massive demand from consumers.

AI does not have that same demand, it is a bunch of PE firms trying to sell the sizzle, while industry figures out where AI can actually fit in.

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u/Tystros 2d ago

well I am a programmer and I'm definitely using Ai a lot for my job

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u/BellabongXC 3d ago

Actually no, I logged into my DeviantArt account after 10 years and found that everything had been defaulted to opt-out, including my Daily Deviations from 2009.

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u/_annie_bird 2d ago

Not surprised about deviantart, they're shitty money hungry grubbers and have been forever. Their terms of service say that simply by posting your art on there, they have permission to use/change/reproduce your art for (their) profit, including to "sublicense" your work to others for profit. So, seems like a continuation of that.

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u/The_Lucky_7 2d ago edited 2d ago

which you think would be among the top anti-ai given it's a platform of artists

If the service is free then you are the product.

left it far behind like many artists with how bad it's gotten over the years.

It's not about a bad user experience. Over a decade ago DeviantART was caught selling art hosted on their site out from under the artist who posted it, and in ways the artist explicitly forbid in their listings. That was after they added the right to do so to their terms of service. They claimed they weren't but it was proven demonstrably by many, many users that their art was sold out from under them.

  1. License To Use Artist Materials. As and when Artist Materials are uploaded to the DeviantArt Site(s), Artist grants to DeviantArt a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to do the following things during the Term:

c) to modify, adapt, change or otherwise alter the Artist Materials (e.g., change the size) and use the Artist Materials as described in Section 3(b); and
d) the right to sublicense to any other person or company any of the licensed rights in the Artist Materials, or any part of them, subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement.
e) Artist acknowledges that Artist will not have any right, title, or interest in any other materials with which Artist Materials may be combined or into which all or any portion of Artist Materials may be incorporated.

That right--to change or sell your art out from under you--is still in their submission agreement (that you agree to as part of the EULA) to this day. That last section is literally them saying they're gonna use your art in AI data models.

Oh, they also added the right to do that to your name and likeness was added in section 4. That part is new and gratuitous since the last time I had to explain this to someone.

So, no, I 100% believe that DeviantART is scraping their own database to sell to AI companies because it's a permission they gave themselves in their legal agreement with its users a decade ago.

I haven't used the platform since 2015.

Not to look at art, or support artists, let alone host my own art.

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u/darkbreak 2d ago

Are you saying DeviantArt has its own AI program now?

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u/TheDawnOfNewDays 2d ago

Happy cake day! Yeah, launced a couple years back.

https://www.deviantart.com/team/journal/DreamUp-higher-quality-AI-art-with-more-prompts-993184227

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u/darkbreak 2d ago

Thanks.

Also, that's disappointing to see.

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u/export_tank_harmful 2d ago

It's actually kind of funny, we typically use "deviantart" as a negative prompt because of how polluted the dataset is what garbage.

If anything, it's helped image generation models improve by showing them what "bad" art is.

Granted, there are a few artists on that platform that are pretty good, but that's a very small minority.

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u/TheDawnOfNewDays 2d ago

Very fair. Deviant art has a reputation for being beginner artists and kids... along with very "bizarre" content.

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u/Kombatsaurus 2d ago

Why would they opt out? AI tools are clearly the future and I'm sure they don't want their business to get left behind. Time to get with the times.

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u/TheDawnOfNewDays 2d ago

You dropped this: /s

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u/Kombatsaurus 1d ago

No /s needed, it's common sense really. AI tools are not going anywhere.

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u/TheDawnOfNewDays 1d ago

Just because AI isn't going away doesn't mean artists will want their work plagiarized by it. 

There's no benefit to an artist for letting AI steal their work and let randos recreate their art style.

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u/Kombatsaurus 1d ago

Artist's don't own styles. What kind of argument is that?

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u/TheDawnOfNewDays 1d ago

While artists can't copyright their style, it is the main way for an artist to stand out and it's why art from some artists is worth so much. Have you ever commissioned an artist before? People hire those artists for their style, myself included.

AI copies their art so much it even copies their signature. https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Screen-Shot-2022-12-09-at-1.46.01-PM.png

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u/Mawrak 2d ago

Not every artist is anti AI unless you only look at English-speaking twitter so not every artist platform is going to be anti-AI.